The Right Way To Change Your Twitter Handle (Username)

Changing your Twitter ID is a pretty straight forward task. To do this, you go into your Twitter account settings, type in the username you’d like to change your account to and if it’s not taken, you hit the save button.

What happens when you change your Twitter username?

Twitter does a good job when it comes to the username transition. Changing your ID won’t affect your follower count, you’ll continue to be on Twitter lists, your old tweets and direct messages will remain intact and everything will continue to work just as it did before.

What’s the problem then?

Let’s say that your original Twitter ID was @seoking and you decided to change it to @seoqueen. Twitter automatically shifts your followers and friends to your new ID (@seoqueen) however search engines will have indexed your old ID (@seoking) for quite awhile.

So what does this mean?

If people are searching for your Twitter account on Google, there’s a chance they’ll come across your old profile page that no longer exists, returning a 404 error since you’ve changed your alias. Bad if you’re a business and your customers are looking to connect. So, in order to redirect your customers, potential friends, whoever, when you change your Twitter ID it’s a good idea to reserve the old one before anyone else has a chance to claim it.

Changing Twitter Handles the Right Way

Step 1: Go to your Twitter account settings and change the username from seoking to seoqueen.

Step 3: Use seoking as the handle for your new Twitter account and set your profile URL to twitter.com/seoking. In your profile description, you can say something like – “this account has moved, please follow @seoqueen.” You can even post a tweet with your new account saying the same message.

Now if people happen to find your old Twitter page via search engines or links on other web sites, they’ll still be able to find and follow you on your new profile.